IthacaLit

In the News

Eclectic works stand out in Memphis College of Art’s 2016 Alumni Biennial

...the tremendous "El Hielo," by Fidencio Martinez (BFA, '13), a 7.5-by-14-foot creation, like a vast city or complex geography, composed of acrylic, ink, cut paper, prints and maps, with so many elements held in place by map pins that the pins themselves lend texture to the enterprise. In a sense, this is the static version of Green's installation, though since the Spanish word means "ice" or "coldness," we feel a sense of the awful sublime that emerges from the confrontation with the unknowable.By Fredric Koeppel, Special to The Commercial Appeal

New Collection by Renee Ashley

Renée Ashley’s stunning new book is indeed a “view from the body,” but it’s a “body named / bone, named brain.” Haunted at times by the dead, by the past, by death itself, Ashley finds her most frequent specter in the self and its disturbances, which few poets since Dickinson have explored so unflinchingly. Language is the means of both exploration and transcendence: words burst into double meanings, invent themselves, and reverse our linguistic expectations, carried throughout by the musical exuberance of consonant and vowel. Taut, resonant, lyrical, edgy, these poems are, as one title has it, “Such Threads of Light As Exist in Deep Pools.”

—Martha Collins, author of Blue Front and White Papers

Celebrating 20 Years of Black Poetry and Cave Canem on Father's Day

Tyehimba Jess

Janera Solomon, executive director of the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater, said poetry readings are not just for academics...

Cave Canem was founded in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1996 to nurture black poetry, which has often been undervalued, overlooked or stereotyped in the literary world, advocates say. Mr. [Terrance] Hayes, a former faculty member, and fellow poet Dawn Lundy Martin are co-directors and founders of the event’s co-sponsor, the University of Pittsburgh’s new Center for African-American Poetry and Poetics.

“As creative scholars, we are putting some kind of language to the work that is happening. It is as big as the Harlem Renaissance,” Ms. Martin said.

Fellows have gone on to win Pulitzer Prizes, MacArthur “genius grants,” National Poet Laureate honors and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is neither an academic symposium nor a writing conference. Through a wide range of poetry readings, storytelling sessions, and musical performances, participants are invited to spend four days immersed in our most ancient arts.

The largest poetry event in North America comes to New Jersey’s largest city when the 30th Anniversary Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival return to Newark from Thursday October 20th through Sunday October 23rd, 2016. For four days Newark’s vibrant downtown Arts District will be transformed into a poetry village featuring some of our most celebrated, diverse and vibrant poets and spoken word artists.

The biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival offers four days of readings, discussions, and conversations with over 50 internationally and nationally renowned poets.

DeRay McKesson Appointed to Interim Position With Baltimore's Public Schools

...this role is about finding great people, matching them to the right role, and helping them to develop and experience careers in the service of our kids.McKesson, a Baltimore native, told The Sun.

Civil rights activist and former Baltimore mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson will return to his old stamping grounds at city school headquarters to lead the district's office of human capital. Mckesson was named interim chief human capital officer on Tuesday by incoming schools CEO Sonja Santelises.

"He has the depth of knowledge of the system, and he has proved that he can lift the work in a short amount of time," Santelises said in an interview. "And he has proven his dedication to the children of Baltimore."

Green Horse Poetry School in Ithaca, NY

Jay Leeming is a poet and the founder of Green Horse Poetry School. He is the author of the poetry books Dynamite on a China Plate (Backwaters Press, 2006) and Miracle Atlas (Writers and Books, 2011). He studied classical violin as a child, has a B.A. in music from Bates College, and once spent eight years playing rock music in Minneapolis, Minnesota. From 2012 to 2015, he worked four months of each year as a ranger-naturalist in Yosemite National Park, teaching geology, natural history and astronomy to visitors. His poems have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, and he has taught poetry workshops throughout the United States and abroad. He is the former editor of the journal Rowboat: Poetry in Translation and the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

But we could sing we’re not afraid, because we were. So music is a form, a poetic form of telling the truth. —Rev. Edwin King